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MYTH: Marijuana Isn't Medicine

QUEEN VICTORIA
Reigned Great Britain from 1837-1901 

Sir John Russell Reynolds served a thirty-seven year tenure as Queen Victoria's personal physician. During his extensive services, Reynolds found cannabis useful for treating menstrual cramps, dysmenorrhea, migraine, neuralgia, epileptic convulsions, and senile insomnia. He wrote a scientific review of cannabis in 1890 that noted, "When pure and administered carefully, it is one of the most valuable medicines we possess." (J.R. Reynolds, "On the Therapeutical Uses and Toxic Effects of Cannabis Indica," Lancet 1 (1890): 637-38.)

Source: C. Conrad, Hemp for Health, 1997, Healing Arts Press (Rochester, VT)

MYTH: Hemp is Marijuana

PANCHO VILLA (POSSIBLE POTHEAD)
Mexican Revolutionary General

To many, Pancho Villa is revered as a hero who pushed foreign "proprietors" out of Mexico and fought for the common man. He was a fierce general who also helped those in need and rescued orphans. Villa's troops were said to smoke marijuana, a term they used for the flowering tops of the hemp plant (pos-sibly named for a juana (female soldier) in Villa's army.) The folk song "La Cucaracha" tells of a cockroach who cannot function because he lacks marijuana to smoke.

During the Spanish American War, Villa's troops seized 800,000 acres of prime timberland from newspaperman William Randolph Hearst. Hearst soon began a smear campaign against marijuana, claiming its dark-skinned users turned murderous. The campaign was useful in racist attempts to deny Mexican laborers work in the U.S. Americans didn't realize the scary-sounding drug marijuana was in fact their old friend Cannabis hemp. Hemp is perhaps the most useful natural resource on the planet, a source of paper, fiber, fuel, food, and medicine, which continues to be denied to mankind due to ignorance and fear.

Source: J. Herer, The Emperor Wears No Clothes

POSSIBLE POTHEAD
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Playwright and poet

Clay pipe fragments excavated from Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon home contain small amounts of cocaine and myristic acid - a hallucinogenic derived from plants, including nutmeg. The pipes, which were examined with the help of Inspector Tommie van der Merwe of the South African Police Service's Forensic Science Laboratory, also show hints of residues of cannabis. The findings were published in the South African Journal of Science.

Source: E. Stoddard, Pipes show cocaine smoked in Shakespeare's England, Reuters, March 1, 2001.

Evidence of cannabis use by Shakespeare is also found in Sonnet #76, the "noted weed" sonnet:

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

POSSIBLE POTHEAD
GEORGE WASHINGTON
Father of Our Country

Washington's diary reports that he separated males from females in his hemp garden, "rather too late." Much speculation has ensued about whether or not Washington's reason for sexing his plants was to make a more smokable product. One thing is for sure: hemp was grown in the US colonies as far back as Jamestown, with several colonies ordering their farmers to grow it. Thomas Paines's pamphlet Common Sense lists hemp as the first requirement for revolution, writing that in the colonies "hemp flourishes almost to rankness." Thomas Jefferson also grew hemp on his plantation and went to great lengths to smuggle hemp seeds out of China. Jared Eliot wrote, "I am informed by my worthy friend Benjamin Franklin, Esq., of Philadelphia, that they raise hemp upon their drained lands.

SOURCE: C. Conrad, Hemp: Lifeline to the Future, p. 25.

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